


Everything in Transit

by rivlee



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Families of Choice, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 12:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1227007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivlee/pseuds/rivlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers is not just a figure in history books. His life, his choices, and his family are not just parts of the past left to be debated by the public.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything in Transit

**Author's Note:**

> So Spuzz posted this lovely graphic of Steve and Natasha and Families of Choice [here](http://spuzz.tumblr.com/post/77533051168), and I was overcome with feelings so I wrote this.

Steve Rogers grew up known to the tight-knit community that came with the packed working class streets of his part of Flatbush in Brooklyn. They had their own code there, and it didn’t welcome outsiders. You didn’t talk to cops unless you knew them. You only went to the neighborhood doctors. Hospitals weren’t safe, and the place you went if you meant to die. The Old Timers remembered when Brooklyn wasn’t even part of New York City, and proudly wore the badge of pride for just want it meant to be from those streets. People might of dreamed of getting out of there, but no one really left unless it came with a pine box, and half those people were buried in Holy Cross Cemetery anyway. 

Steve grew up First Generation American, born on the Fourth of July, with two parents who schooled him to only _speak like us when you’re home_. He grew up in a tenement building with two other families in the same space. After his father died, they moved into an apartment that housed four families, plus the two of them. After Sarah Rogers died, Steve lived in dormitory rooms of boarding houses, with nothing but his clothes, his art supplies and his medical conditions to his name. His idea of privacy _still_ greatly differed from everyone else.

Now he lived in Brooklyn Heights, a place he could only _dream_ about when he was a kid, trying to make a living delivery goods from the store to people with more money than his whole apartment building. He once felt invisible on these same streets that now housed bookstores with whole sections devoted to Captain America—and even a few to plain old Steve Rogers, the man behind the stars and stripes. Biographies, memoirs, comic books, coffee table photography tomes, all mostly about the Ideal rather than the man. Steve wondered _who_ all these wannabe detectives, investigators, and journalists would’ve talked to back on the streets he once called home. The neighborhood protected its own, and wouldn’t have blabbed to anyone about Steve, or even Bucky, unless it was one of the few kids lucky enough to secure a WPA job. 

Steve flipped through a few of the books to find the names of contributors. There were familiar ones, and strangers, and all had one unifying theme. They all knew him _after_. After Erskine saved him from surely being arrested by the military police. After he proved a mostly successful experiment. After he was a dancing monkey on stage. After he’d committed insubordination of the highest order to rescue the 107th. After the war films and propaganda shots in the costume and the uniform. After Bucky’s fall. After Steve’s crash. After seventy years on ice.

There were academic works devoted to his legacy—to that skinny kid from Brooklyn too stupid to back down from a fight or pick his battles. Everyone from historians to sociologists to anthropologists had devoted thousands of pages to his impact. Psychologists posited on what all the recovered pieces of his art meant. Political Scientists argued about where he would lean, if he would hold up the vital center. The most recent works delved into the ramifications of his return. He wasn’t just the Man out of Time, he was living history—a legend that still breathed, and walked the earth. If Captain America was the one dinner guest all these people imagined having at their tables, how the hell was Steve Rogers supposed to deal with that? 

The doctors SHIELD had voluntold him to meet with were more concerned about Steve’s ability to adjust to modern times, rather than the true unique parameters of his situation. They were worried he would break in this world so unfamiliar with the one he left; that he would be stuck mourning all the people he lost. There was truth to all that— of course there was. Steve had been sure of his death one moment then woke up to a world that proved the war he fought—and died—for was far from the one to end all wars. 

What all those doctors and overly concerned staff failed to remember was that Steve buried both his parents before he was eighteen. They forget that necessity taught him how to fight and survive in a world when his own body betrayed him. They forgot that Erskine’s formula wasn’t what gave Steve the will to fight, just the physical strength to do so. What they forgot was that Steve was a child of a world of change, had come of age at the tail end of the Depression, and knew hand-to-mouth survival as the only way to live. 

Handheld computers weren’t going to break a man only standing before them by the power of science and technological magic. Questions about how _he_ would change the parts of history he slept through terrified Steve far more than the convenience of carrying around a radio smaller than his wallet. 

Steve could feel eyes boring into his back and he tensed up, forcing the Public Relations Approved smile on his face, before turning around. 

Natasha stood behind him, dressed down in a faded black t-shirt and jeans, studying the shelf before them. She was welcome, and familiar, and meant more to him than anything between the pages of all these books. 

“Didn’t Stark advise you to stay away from all this?” she asked.

Steve relaxed his shoulders in her presence; there was no use wasting energy in the pretext or imagery of Captain America. Natasha would see through it anyway, even if it wasn’t for the fact that Steve respected and cared for her enough to allow himself to be genuinely _himself_ around her. 

“Doesn’t everyone talk about visiting their own funerals?” he asked. He gestured to the fully stacked bookshelf. “All these people wrote my eulogy, and only a handful ever knew Captain America.”

“Even fewer knew Steve Rogers,” she said.

Steve nodded. “I…in the war I never imagined what would happen when all of it was done. None of us did. Sure we talked about going home, starting families, but hell, Nat, most of us were stupid kids. You know what Bucky and I talked about? Visiting the Grand Canyon. We’d never been west of Texas before then, and that had seemed like the edge of the world. By that point in the war, we’d seen more of Europe than we’d ever dream of seeing America.”

“I’m sure you weren’t alone in that,” she said. “Wars are fought by the young and filled with their dead.”

“ _War will make corpses of us all_ ,” he quoted.

Natasha’s eyes widened for a moment, before her face settled into a small, unguarded smile. “Didn’t figure you for a Tolkien fan, though I suppose you can identify with Frodo Baggins.”

“Just a little,” Steve agreed. 

He placed the book in his hands back on the shelf. He’d had enough reading the reinterpretations of his own history for today.

“The newer works are greatly uninformed though,” he said.

“Even with your public persona, most of your missions do remain classified,” Natasha said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Steve clarified. He slipped an arm around Natasha’s shoulders only because she granted him that privilege, because sometimes even the Black Widow needed someone to lean on; because even more often she needed to be reminded someone trusted her enough to lean on _her_. “They keep forgetting my new family.”


End file.
